The Future's So Bright
by Gamebird
Summary: Sylar uses Hiro's ability to travel to the future, where he is dazzled by the new world he finds and the people in it.


Sylar was no stranger to snap decisions, nor to having to survive the consequences of them. Under other circumstances, he'd have thought carefully about when and where he wanted to go, but the charging of Hiro's angry sidekick left him little time to consider his options. He used the power he'd just acquired, taking a long leap away from his present situation.

A blink later, he was crouched in a small, empty room instead of over a cooling corpse. Sylar stood. The walls weren't featureless, but he wasn't sure what to make of the features they sported. He turned slowly, looking from the tight weave of the aqua carpeting up the … wood? and plastic paneling to the recessed lighting and slightly arched, ribbed ceiling. His ability usually made sense of things instantly. Now it was laboring a bit, but the moment a section of wall parted with a hiss, he knew he was in an elevator. He also knew that elevators weren't the only things here that didn't appear as he might expect them to.

In the doorway, a man halted – or at least what Sylar thought was a man, given the lack of obvious female characteristics. He was otherwise androgynous. "Do you require assistance?" the stranger inquired in melodic tones that hinted at an accent Sylar couldn't place.

Sylar plastered a completely innocent look on his face and shrugged. "No. No, I'm fine." He acted like he didn't happen to have someone's blood coating his hands up to the wrist, currently drying to a sticky tackiness that he hated. The stranger regarded him for a few seconds more before accepting his self-assessment. The man stepped into the elevator with him, turning neatly in place to face the way he'd come.

"Observation deck," the other said to the air, and Sylar surmised that they began to move. He couldn't feel it, which was disconcerting, but the elevator helpfully flashed a sequence of lights near the ceiling to simulate the crossing of space.

The guy had pointed ears. Sylar's eyes crawled all over that feature. He'd already worked out that Hiro's ability had thrown him forward in time several hundred years. Was that enough time for people to mutate like this, or was it merely cosmetic, an extension of plastic surgery, piercings, and body alteration? Appearances certainly mattered. The person he was looking at was inhumanly flawless – smooth, perfectly unblemished skin (although oddly greenish in cast – perhaps tinted with a powder?); crisp, seamless clothing; and not a single black hair out of place. He was so well groomed that Sylar felt like a rough barbarian in comparison, standing there with dirty hair in disarray, two day's scruff growing on his face, his ragged clothing spattered with gore and his hands crimson.

Their transit was brief, but long enough that the other man had time to notice the close scrutiny and respond to it with a subtle challenge. "What is your destination?"

Sylar recognized the hidden edge to the pointy-eared guy's question. Observation decks were usually at the top of structures. The elevator was apparently going directly there. This implied that Sylar was not getting off on any of the intervening floors and since he didn't know what any of those were called, or how tall the building was, he could easily misstep by stating something random. "The observation deck," he lied comfortably.

The doors hissed open and Sylar hoped that would be the end of it, but the other man wasn't so easily duped. "Are you part of the dinner party?" he pressed, still suspicious and hiding it under a veneer of politeness.

"No," Sylar said, stepping forward aggressively and forcing the other man to choose between blocking him and getting out of the way. "I'm the entertainment." That earned him an upshot eyebrow as he brushed by, a tingle achingly informing him that the man had an ability, but Sylar had a different hunger to sate – curiosity. For outside the doors to the elevator was a vast bank of windows overlooking a bay. He strode forward, aware that he stood out jarringly from the people and … beings he was walking through, but he'd already decided he wasn't staying. He didn't belong here, but he still wanted to _see_.

Behind him a cheerful, boisterous voice called out, "Hey, Spock! Glad you finally made it!" Then a pause, and, "Who's that guy?" The melodic voice intoned an answer that Sylar couldn't make out through the rising buzz of the small crowd, but he knew he'd been made. He had only a minute or two now, but he was already at the windows. He stared out over the landscape. Verdant copses were interspersed with shining buildings and welcoming patches of lawn on what looked to be a well-organized campus. Motion and the flash of reflected sunlight attracted his eye to the ships like futuristic flying cars passing sedately through the air. The Golden Gate Bridge told him he was in San Francisco, but the harbor and even the shoreline was vastly changed. A very few sailboats and some other water-going vessels dotted the sea, along with … he leaned forward … yes, what looked like a galleon. Apparently in the future, they continued to have recreationists. That was amusing, bringing to mind the saying, 'Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.' But had these people learned?

That loud voice from earlier sounded behind him. "Hey, friend. Spock here says you're part of the entertainment. Funny, we didn't book any."

Well, they hadn't learned not to cause trouble for themselves. Or maybe they _had_ learned not to idly ignore the out-of-place like a bunch of mindless sheep, because even Sylar agreed that the smart thing to do was to confront him. Sylar turned to face the man, annoyed at the interruption to his sight-seeing, and instantly irritated in particular by the brash, sandy-haired man's cocky manner. "Oh," he purred, "I can be very entertaining," he promised, lowering his head and raising his blood-soaked hands.

Sylar wasn't sure what he had intended to do, but he knew he was intimidating as hell like this. Normal people tended to scream and run. These people were not 'normal' in the sense he despised – they were special, each and every one of them. They were more highly evolved than the primitives he was usually surrounded with. They saw the wolf under the sheep's clothing instantly. Spock's friend glanced at Sylar's hands and then gave him a small, condescending smile, completely unimpressed. Beyond the man, reinforcements were arriving – some human, some questionable, some clearly not. An awareness of multiple abilities, or what seemed like them, bristled along Sylar's skin. If there was a fight, abilities or no, he suspected he wouldn't win.

"Behold," Sylar said with theatrical flair, spreading his arms out to either side. "My first magic trick." He vanished, picking a time and place more familiar to him. With Hiro's ability, he could go back any time he pleased. He smiled to himself as he walked into the bathroom of his apartment to wash that damn blood off. His future had never seemed so bright.


End file.
